


Outside Looking In

by Lisse



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Hetalia: Axis Powers, Homestuck, Hunger Games (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-26
Updated: 2012-05-26
Packaged: 2017-11-06 01:59:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/413469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lisse/pseuds/Lisse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An assortment of people who might have changed Panem, but probably didn't.</p>
<p>(or: Blender Fusion Fic: Special Hunger Games Edition)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Old Woman from District One

As far as anyone's ever been able to determine, Jane Crocker won the Third Hunger Games by being too likeable to kill. In her interviews - which still get aired occasionally, just for the hell of it - she talks about how happy she is to represent District One and how her favorite hobby is making pies. She's quite clever, however, and resourceful and sweet and easy to get along with, and she emerges from the arena victorious without having to do anything more drastic than club a couple of particularly stubborn tributes into unconsciousness and run like the wind.

In any event, she becomes quite popular afterwards. She hosts a rather successful cooking show and is a good mentor to the tributes who actually put up with her practical jokes long enough to listen to her, and she generally strikes everyone as a bit more _balanced_  than most victors. Certainly she handles things better than the boy from the Second Games, who responded to winning by growing a ridiculous mustache (even by Capitol standards) and absconding into the wilderness to be a professional hermit.

So Jane has a good head on her shoulders. She handles the absurdity of her situation well. Very little bothers her.

She doesn't like the Fiftieth Games _at all_. There's something so nasty and vicious and  _serious_ about it.

But she has a job to do, so she chooses one of the tributes to mentor. Two of the District One children aren't likely to last five minutes and the third - a girl who puts her in mind of a spider, somehow - just seems too unstable. However, the second boy, whose name she manages to remember eventually, happens to share a number of traits with her, from enormous front teeth to an unwarranted sense of optimism. He appreciates the importance of laying traps and of telling jokes to keep one's spirits up, and he's fairly quick on his feet and is reasonably good at bashing things with maces and hammers.

And he does about as well as can be expected, all things considered. He forms a very sensible alliance with three other tributes, and then another secret alliance on the side with the spider girl, and _another_  alliance with that loud short boy with the sickles from District Eleven - and yes, all right, he dies in a rather spectacularly dumb way, but at least he was _trying_  to cheat the system.

Jane admires people like that. It tells her they get the joke.

That's probably why, when the Fiftieth Games are over, she visits the boy from District Twelve while he's still recovering from his injuries. He's only vaguely conscious, but she decides that will just have to do and settles herself in the chair beside his hospital bed, having shooed the hovering nurses and guards off with her best harmless old grandmother expression and the promise of delicious baked goods waiting for them down the hall.

"I like what you did out there, dearie," she says, sitting with her hands folded in her lap like the prim Capitol lady she very much isn't. "With the force field. Very funny. Not bad. Not bad at all."

The boy looks at her like she's a mad old woman, which to be fair, is probably accurate.

"The Capitol's not the type to have a sense of humor," she adds mildly. "No appreciation for fun and games. No idea how _ridiculous_  this all is. Not the sort to know a good prank when it hits them." She laughs and claps him on the shoulder, just hard enough that hopefully he'll remember later. "Good job showing them up. Try it again sometime."

Then she sweeps off, because it would be terribly bad manners not to make sure all the guards get a slice of pie.

It takes almost another quarter-century - twenty-four years of mentoring and scolding and swatting humorless tributes in the shins with her cane, to be exact - before she gets to see the boy pull another prank on the Capitol, him and his ridiculously serious, dramatic, _wonderful_  pair of tributes. It's worth the wait.

Jane's old and respected enough to be sitting with quite a senior audience when the Seventy-Fourth Games turn into a farce. That's probably why, surrounded by people who vary between shocked and angered and suspiciously disapproving, she's the only one who doubles over in a fit of hysterical laughter. 


	2. President Snow and the Little Girl

The little girl doesn't bother to enter your rooms. One moment she isn’t there and the next moment she is, sitting primly and properly with her ankles crossed and her tiny hands folded in her lap.   
  
You do not startle. You did not become president, much less  _stay_  president, by reacting without careful, deliberate thought. Besides, you already know someone who can come and go as he pleases, and while you have him firmly under your control, he is much more frightening than a small child.   
  
“Which district are you?” you ask.   
  
The little girl blinks up at you. Her clothes suggest she is from one of the poorer areas, but in every other way she is so completely nondescript that she could be from anywhere. “What makes you think I’m a district?”   
  
“You’re not the Capitol,” you say, settling yourself into your chair, “and I am not stupid.”   
  
“Oh,” the little girl says. “Yes, of course. I know that.” She smiles. One of her front teeth is missing. “Which district do you think I am?”   
  
You consider this. You’ve met the more well-behaved ones - One and Two are smaller and slightly less brutal versions of the Capitol, complete with the same height and pale hair and blue eyes; Four is frankly insufferable - and you know most of the others on sight, except for the very poorest and most difficult districts.   
  
“Eleven,” you say. “Or Twelve. It hardly matters.”   
  
The little girl smiles wider. Something about her is nagging at you, something that puts her at odds with what you know about the other districts, but you can’t put your finger on  _what_ . “Is that really the best you can do?”   
  
You know better than to waste your breath snapping at her for being disrespectful. Districts are like that, and some rule or another - or the Capitol, perhaps - prevents her from actually hurting you. “It hardly matters,” you repeat. “ _You_  hardly matter.”   
  
She claps her hands over her mouth and laughs like a delighted child trying desperately to be polite, and that is when it finally hits you.    
  
The other districts, even the newest ones, appear to be well into their teens.    
  
This situation is wrong.  _She_  is wrong.  But you are the president and you   keep your voice steady. “Why are you so  _young?_ ”   
  
The little girl lowers her hands back into her lap. Her face pulls into a long-suffering frown that doesn’t fit her child’s face at all. “What else would I be? You try being older in my situation. I  _was_  just born, you know.”    
  
Something inside you goes very cold, but before you can demand to know what she means by that, every piece of communications equipment in the room lights up at once. There is a problem with the Games. There is a problem in District Eleven. There is a problem with the tributes from District Twelve.   
  
By the time you turn back to the little girl, she is long gone. There is no sign that she was ever there at all, except for the chaos she leaves behind.   
  
(The Capitol isn’t surprised. Annoyed, his eyes narrowed and dangerous behind his wire-rim glasses, but not surprised.   
  
The last rebellion was also fond of unannounced visits, it turns out.)


	3. The North Coast of District Four

Sokka, like just about everyone living in the most remote coastal villages, doesn’t bother to turn up for the reaping. For one thing, it’s impossible; the roads are solid mud in the summer and buried under six feet of snow the rest of the year. For another, District Four is a Career district, which means that no matter how many tesserae Sokka’s taken (and after his dad disappeared at sea, the answer is “way too many”), there will always be some wealthy meathead jumping at the chance to volunteer. There’s absolutely no point in him or his little sister Katara or anyone else making the long and frankly dangerous trek south to see someone else get picked. Fortunately for everyone, the district’s pragmatic mayor seems to agree.

Unfortunately for Sokka in particular, the mayor does insist that each village switch on the official broadcast screen and at least make a show of watching the proceedings. This year the screen won’t switch on - and who knows, maybe it’s been busted for months, it’s not like anyone bothers to tune in to official Capitol broadcasts the rest of the year. Since Sokka and Katara are pretty much the only young and able-bodied people in their village these days, that means they get to push their family’s rickety canoe into the frozen water, row to the nearest relay tower, and see what’s frozen over this time.

Which is how Sokka finds himself staring at a jumbled collapsed mess of metal - some of which unquestionably used to be the tower, some of which very obviously wasn’t - while Katara fusses over a rather confused-looking boy and his giant slobbery evil demon-dog.

“Where the hell did you even come from?” Sokka butts in, before Katara can decide she and a mysterious and frankly untrustworthy stranger are best buddies forever. “I don’t see any sled tracks.”

The boy blinks. “Oh! You wouldn’t,” he says, his strange rounded accent somehow adding a whole extra layer of enthusiasm to his words. He jabs a finger at the mass of metal that probably didn’t come from the relay tower. “I flew.”

Sokka exchanges a glance with his sister. That’s not technology the Fourth District has. From the very little he knows, that’s not technology any district has.

Thankfully Katara picks up on that. “Where did you fly in from?”

The boy flails an arm in a general eastward direction. “That way.”

“From the Capitol?” Katara tries, and then darts another, much more disapproving glance at her brother, because Sokka’s just put his hand on his knife. 

“What Capitol?” The boy’s face screws up for a moment in deep thought before he starts to rummage through his pack. “Wait, hold on, I’ve got a map somewhere - “

What he pulls out is crinkled, folded, and upside-down. Sokka snatches it out of his hands and spreads it carefully on the hard, packed snow. His heart starts to sink even before he hears his sister’s gasp, because he hardly recognizes anything - not the strange picture-strings that can only be sentences, not the landmasses, not the oceans, nothing except the little strip of coastline that he knows as his own little corner of District Four.

He works out from there, the sinking feeling getting even worse. Because now that he knows what he’s looking at, there’s the rest of the District. There’s District Three and Five adjoining it, and the other districts and the Capitol.

There’s Panem. And outside of it, there’s...everything else.

He didn’t even know there was an everything else.

“You’re not from Panem,” Katara’s saying, while the boy looks at them like they’ve lost their minds. “You’re from outside of Panem.” She doesn’t sound nearly as panicked or worried as Sokka knows she should. Practically the opposite, in fact.

He looks at his sister and sees stars in her eyes.

Maybe it would’ve been better to go to the reaping after all.


	4. The Boy Who Lived

The girl from District Eight is an intelligent, beautiful, mulishly stubborn eighteen-year-old, and no one notices anything of these things because she is also very, very pregnant.

No one expects much of her, either, but she survives anyway - day after day, long after her loose little alliance disintegrates in a nasty series of betrayals, long after the boy who hastily volunteered to be her district’s male tribute finally dies - and by the end of it all she’s the most sympathetic and popular and sweetly angelic victor the Games have ever had. When her son is born, looking almost exactly like the District Eight volunteer who died in the arena, she parades him all over the Capitol, making sure everyone remembers him, making sure the interviewers coo over how wonderfully precious and miraculous he is and give him a nickname that sticks.

All this so that when she finally gets in arm’s reach of President Snow and makes a spirited but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to stab him in the throat, he can’t do a damn thing to her popular, adored little son. Everyone forgot how fucking smart she is. 

But it’s years and years later and none of this means a damn thing to the two tributes from District Twelve.

They’re a pair of siblings that year, a seventeen-year-old boy and his sixteen-year-old sister. Ordinarily this might attract some sort of attention, but since everyone’s focused on District Eight and another reaping entirely, the only thing anyone bothers to say about them is that it’s their parents’ fault for having so many children in the first place.

It’s an older group that year, more seasoned and jaded and - with one crucial exception - not as good at tugging at Capitol heartstrings as wide-eyed expectant mothers. Maybe to make up for this, to add more drama, the tributes are placed in large dormitories instead of in single or double rooms and given strict orders not to kill each other beforehand. The boy from District Twelve assumes they’re being filmed anyway, so he finds an unoccupied top bunk as far away from the pale (and honestly rather scared-looking) District One tribute and contents himself with worrying about his sister and hoping no one smothers him in his sleep.

All things considered, when a head appears over the side of his bunk, it’s a minor miracle he doesn’t scream like a frightened baby and shove its owner off the ladder.

Instead he gets the most recognizable person in Panem looking at him intently and asking, “Has anyone claimed the bottom bunk yet?”

He opens his mouth, then shuts it before he can say something really stupid, like “Did you seriously volunteer? Are you mental?” and “You weren’t born in the arena, right? Because I heard you were.” Instead he blinks, probably looking a bit like a poleaxed deer, and nods once.

“Good. Thought I’d be stuck with Draco over there.” The boy grins and awkwardly holds out a hand over the edge of the bunk. “I'm Harry,” he says, completely unnecessarily.

The boy from District Twelve thinks this is probably the last person he wants to be forming an alliance with, but he shrugs mentally and shakes hands anyway. “Ron.”


End file.
